Frequency

There are two movies buzzing around inside Gregory Hoblit's cosmological thriller Frequency, and I'm not sure they're ever on the same wavelength. There's an upbeat movie about a father and son trying to reach each other across time--Contact by way of Back to the Future. And there's a downbeat movie about the police trying to capture a serial killer (across time)--Hoblit's own Fallen by way of "NYPD Blue." Considering that Hoblit used to direct episodes of the latter, it's pretty easy to see where his real sympathies lie. For better or worse, he lacks the Spielberg touch, the ability to pour gloppy sentiment down our throats without making us gag. Sometimes entertaining but rarely moving, Frequency is light pulp buried under heavy pulp, a "Twilight Zone" episode that wants to be The Sixth Sense. Dennis Quaid and The Thin Red Line's Jim Caviezel are the father and son separated by the 30 years since the father, a firefighter, died on the job. The son, who still lives in the house he grew up in, has found it difficult to move on with his life--i.e., misses his dad. Then, on a night when the northern lights are turning the sky over Queens into a luminous band of cotton candy, he somehow manages to reach his father on dad's old ham radio--dad in 1969, son in 1999. The script gives us a short lecture on string theory, physicists' latest plaything, but we know the rules: You can mess with the past, but only at the expense of changing the present. And that's exactly what our boys do as, first, dad's death is averted and then, after everything's rearranged, mom's life becomes imperiled. And not just mom's....

Unleashing a serial killer seems both trendy and trite, not to mention difficult to square with the sunnier side of the movie's temperament. So is Caviezel's mopey performance, by the way, whereas Quaid seems content to busy himself with his Archie Bunker accent. Andre Braugher is around to liven things up, but he's stuck in the stock role of the incredulous cop. Finally, my only pleasure in the movie was sorting out the time-travel conundrums. (Whenever someone in 1969 gets killed, he or she fades from all the 1999 photographs, à la Back to the Future.) There's a good movie in there somewhere, but the filmmakers have neglected to ground it firmly in one or more genres. This kind of thing may work like a charm in some parallel universe, but not here.